The incoming head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday he did not see any hard evidence Iran was trying to gain the ability to develop nuclear arms…. I don’t see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this,” Yukiya Amano told Reuters in his first direct comment on Iran’s atomic program since his election…
(don’t expect the new war-mongering “Left” to mark this discrepancy anytime soon...)
The American military is in the midst of a major offensive in Afghanistan, aimed at wiping out opposition to the US occupation in the country’s southern Helmand province.
… The Obama administration is carrying out a new war crime in Afghanistan.
… The offensive has underscored the role of the so-called “left” in the US. The Obama administration has become a vehicle for a wide variety of middle-class organizations that opposed the war in Iraq to swing behind the foreign policy of the American government.
… Neither of the principal organizations involved in planning US protests against the Iraq war—United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and ANSWER—are planning any demonstrations to denounce the Obama administration’s escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nor, for that matter, are they preparing any opposition to the continuation of the Iraq occupation.
Honduran troops on Sunday fired on anti-coup demonstrators outside the airport in the capital, Tegucigalpa, killing at least two and wounding many more. Thousands had converged on the heavily guarded airport to show support for deposed President Manuel Zelaya, who flew from Washington DC earlier in the day in a bid to return to Honduras and reclaim power.
… The (Obama) administration has refused even to formally declare Zelaya’s ouster at gunpoint a coup, claiming it is studying the situation.
… There is evidence that the Obama administration was intimately involved in pre-coup plans to oust Zelaya, … The official said, “There was talk of how they might remove the president from office, how he could be arrested, on whose authority they could do that.”
and just for some more background on Micheletti’s Cabinet selections:
Meet Enrique Ortez, the man given the job of Chancellor of Honduras (basically foreign minister) by the usurper Micheletti… “But he went for more by defining President Barack Obama of The United States as “that little black man who doesn’t know anything“. IKN
[read after the break for a running account from Sunday, of the events as they happened.]
"Iraq's future belongs to those who are working to rebuild it (Halliburton & KBR?)" Joe Biden
Vice President Joe Biden on Friday warned Iraqi officials that Washington would politically disengage if sectarian and ethnic strife resumed as he warned of a “hard road ahead”.
“The president (Barack Obama) and I appreciate that Iraq has traveled a great distance over the past year but there is a hard road ahead if Iraq is going to find lasting peace and stability. It’s not over yet,” he said after talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nur al-Maliki.
The coup against Manuel Zelaya of Honduras represents a last ditch effort by Honduras’ entrenched economic and political interests to stave off the advance of the new left governments that have taken hold in Latin America over the past decade. As Zelaya proclaimed after being forcibly dumped in Costa Rica: “This is a vicious plot planned by elites. The elites only want to keep the country isolated and in extreme poverty.”
(”Helmand is, in reality, the epicentre of popular resistance to the occupation. Thousands of troops have been poured in to force the population to submit.“
… It has been conceived for Obama by the same figures who directed the Bush administration’s surge of tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq in 2007.)
The Obama administration has ordered the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade (2 MEB) into a potentially bloody offensive in the southern province of Helmand. The objective is the suppression of the ethnic Pashtun population, which is overwhelmingly hostile to the seven-and-a-half year US and NATO occupation of the country and rejects the legitimacy of the Afghan puppet government headed by President Hamid Karzai.
“As part of its media strategy to claim public support, the coup regime of Honduras is impeding coup opponents from assembling to demonstrate against the coup. Here, CNN captures coup soldiers shooting out the bus tires 120 km from Tegucigalpa to deter arrival of protesters to the capital.”
